Exploration

It’s update day! I just pushed WP-Gatekeeper 1.5rc3 into the public eye. The major change in this version is that Gatekeeper no longer prevents trackbacks (or pingbacks) from ever reaching your site. See, before, it was effectively destroying all those without notice or appeal. Now it just lets them through, whatever their content.

What this means is that Gatekeeper is, as it always was meant to be, a way to prevent comment-form spambots from succeeding. Trackbots will now get through unless you take other steps, like disabling trackbacks or running another spam filter or something. I’d actually like to see WordPress split tracks/pings apart from comments, and let you set their “always moderated” flags separately. Thus you could set things up so all tracks and pings are moderated, but comment-form comments are not. That would work great for me. Maybe not so well for others, though.

Unfortunately, rc3 still has that problem where it doesn’t always automatically add a challenge to your comment forms, though you can still get the challenge by manually adding gatekeeper_pose_challenge to the comment forms in your theme. My grep-fu (or maybe it’s my PHP-fu; or, hell, both) is weak; I can’t figure out why the routine fails. Anyway, head on over to the Gatekeeper page if you’re interested, and especially if you can figure out why the auto-challenge routine is failing. Thanks.

The thing works great, but can something be done about the error message that is displayed when someone doesn’t fill in the correct answer? Right now it says that comments are closed, but this is a bit confusing for the average user that overlooked it…

Remember to encode character entities if you're posting markup examples! Management reserves the right to edit or remove any comment—especially those that are abusive, irrelevant to the topic at hand, or made by anonymous posters—although honestly, most edits are a matter of fixing mangled markup. Thus the note about encoding your entities. If you're satisfied with what you've written, then go ahead...